This first feature by Catherine Breilllat was made in 1975 but is only now being distributed in the United States. In fact, it was banned in its native France until recently due to the explicit sexual content. It seems the time may be right to take a look at this film dealing with a young girl's sexual awakening in a frank and startling manner. It most certainly is not your typical coming of age story. However, it does give us an honest if painful and shockingly explicit account of one girl's unsettling time in early adolescence.

Alice lives with her parents in the French countryside. She is returning home from school for summer vacation. Her behavior seems that of a girl perhaps age thirteen, but her physical maturity is much older. She bears a sexual presence that goes unnoticed by no one including the local shopkeepers, her mother and father or the young man who works at her father's lumber mill.

The explicit sexual content of this film will no doubt put many viewers off, but there is something worth exploring for those who accept the challenge. Alice's feelings of confusion and disgust about her emerging sexuality may be not uncommon to girls her age. These are compounded by the disparity between her actual age and her unusually well developed and voluptuous body.

She does childish things without seeming to realize the effect she has on others. The judgments of others based on her physicality are unfair and come from all the people she encounters. Her lecherous and philandering father alternately pushes her away for acting like a baby and leers hungrily at her. Her bitter mother scolds her for dressing like a whore but also seeks Alice's comfort and sympathy for her miserable marriage. The woman who runs the local shop views her contemptuously because of her sexuality.

Alice wanders about the house and countryside dreading the long summer holidays with her parents. In her solitary meandering she plays out or perhaps only imagines sexual scenarios about which she has little understanding. She loiters around the lumber mill gazing at the virile young Jim employed by her father. He at first sees her as a child or perhaps as jailbait and he does not want to court trouble. In her confusion, longing, and shame, she pursues him. The ensuing real or imagined encounters with Jim lead to more urgency for Alice but also seem to relieve her distress. This coupling with Jim also leads to tragedy and some bizarre but not unexpected reactions.

Breillat's theme is clearly evident in this early work and possibly more interesting twenty-five years after it was made in light of its further development in Romance and most recently Fat Girl. She describes it as a mental film where everything in the movie is sexual.

It is disturbingly violent and provocative and forces us to see what Alice is trying to see. She is trying to see herself. She writes in her journal. She agonizingly forces herself to look in the mirror. She is struggling to grow up and yet is clinging tenaciously to childhood. The uniquely female problem of being forced to be looked at in a sexual way is at the core here. It is not something that adolescent males are forced to go through. Breillat intelligently requires us to examine this phenomenon in a harsh but genuine light.

Charlotte Alexandra as Alice	Hiram Keller as Jim
Rita Maiden as mother	Bruno Balp as father
Director: Catherine Breillat